At the back door he paused to peek out—and then very quickly, he slammed it shut again. There were zombies in the yard, too many for them to take on. “We’re trapped!” he cried to Deanna, putting his back to the door and feeling the first of what was to be many crashes on the wood.
They were in the narrow mudroom. It had hooks on the walls for coats and a cat litter box that was more feces than litter. The rectangle of a room branched off the family room. Neil pointed back the way they had come. “We need to get upstairs,” he yelled. His ears stung from the constant work of her M4 and he couldn’t tell how loud he was being.
“Give me the pack!” she demanded, holding out a hand. Neil started to protest this waste of time but she snapped her fingers and he gave it up to her, figuring she was burdening herself, unnecessarily. She slung it across her back, reached in her pocket, and produced a shiny pistol. Before handing it over to him, she jacked the slide back and said, “Fourteen shots. Make ‘em count.”
A part of him became indignant since her kill ratio was atrocious, but before he could say anything she had ducked back into the family room and began firing again. “Wait for me,” Neil cried, rushing in after her.
Firing a gun left-handed was an experience. It seemed huge in his hand; unwieldy, and definitely cumbersome. It made him feel as though he were using a gun made for a grown man and he was just a kid. The pull of the trigger was stiff and his first shot missed completely, the bullet going who knew where. His second shot was better, mainly because he fired with the zombie practically looking down the barrel. The room was packed and the beasts were crowding so close that he was constantly being sprayed with warm blood as his bullets struck home.
Deanna fired and fired, but when her gun went dry, there seemed to be more zombies than when she had first started. “Neil! Shit! We’re going to die!” she screamed, as she reloaded.
He couldn’t disagree and yet he didn’t have a moment to spare to calm her nerves; his own were frayed near to the breaking point. She started shooting again piling corpses all over the room. They lay in bloody clumps higher than the furniture. The mounds slowed the zombies down more than their bullets did and Neil found himself with a few seconds to take in their near-hopeless situation.
He spied a door to their left and cried, “Deanna! Over there; get to that door.” He had no idea where it led; he only knew it had to be safer than where they were. Together they charged, shooting as their feet trod upon runs of intestines and squished awfully in blood that was beginning to rise above the level of the shag.
“Get the door,” Neil demanded. To open the door himself he would have to drop his gun and that was something he wasn’t willing to do even if his life depended on it.
“It’s a basement,” Deanna said. “And it’s clear.” For some reason she hadn’t gone down the stairs. Neil fired his last two rounds and then pushed her down into the dim, shadowed basement. Two steps down he paused and said, “Here, take this.” He handed her the scalding pistol and then turned and shut the basement door in the face of a dozen zombies. Stepping back he stared at it, hoping it would hold as they thundered upon it. It never would. He knew that eventually the striker plate would give way or the flat panels would crack and then they would get in.
As Neil was staring uselessly at the door, Deanna reloaded the pistol with a fresh clip and then did the same for her M4. “Don’t just stand there, come on,” she said heading down to the basement.
He followed, feeling a heavy doom hanging over his head and wondering if this was the day his luck would give out. As his arm felt like hot silver was cutting into his shoulder joint, he figured it was. “I’m sorry,” he said to Deanna. “This is all my fault, you know? If I hadn’t…if I hadn’t, uh, done what I did, you’d be safe now.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, trying to peer through the gloom.
“I’m not sure,” Neil said, slowly. The feeling of doom was thick in his mind and the pain in his arm was intense but, worse, he seemed to be having trouble thinking clearly all of a sudden and he didn’t know why. Nor could he remember exactly how they had got there. He remembered the zombies and all the shooting; and he remembered his arm hurt and running through the corn, but there were big chunks of time missing in his memory.
Deanna came back to look him in the eye. Grunting, she said, “That’s the oxycodone talking. You didn’t do anything, Neil except for maybe take too many pills.”
“Ooooh,” he said slowly. That made sense. Now that there was a pause in the excitement, he realized it was the drugs in his system that he was feeling— the sensation was like a cross between being drunk and stoned, meaning that he could not exactly put into words what he was feeling.
He could barely make sense of what was around him. The unfinished basement was altogether normal and contained the usual banalities: a dusty, unused weight bench, a shelf of assorted camping supplies, boxes of Christmas gear and more of Halloween decorations. A wedding dress in a discolored white bag hung from the rafters which were home to more junk: water skis, crutches, a telescope and its tripod.
The edges of the basement were indistinct made blurry by the subterranean dark. Neil blinked slowly around at everything and when he focused his eyes again Deanna was also becoming indistinct as she went deeper into the dark basement. In seconds she disappeared causing Neil to freak out. “Deanna! Deanna! Where did you go?”
A whisper can back to him, “I’m back here. Come on.”
It was too dark for him to feel comfortable about just walking normally. He reached out with his good arm and shuffled sideways as if the family who had lived there had a collection of spears that they stored pointing haphazardly in all directions. He looked ridiculous.
Deanna came back to him, saw him staggering, and said, “You better sit down.” She pushed him down onto a box labeled “winter clothes” before scurrying away. Neil couldn’t tell what she was doing exactly. She would run from wall-to-wall making little leaps but for what purpose he had no idea. His mind was just too muddled.
There came a crash from the basement door that was louder than the rest and with it was the clunking, plunking sound of pieces of wood bouncing down the stairs. He turned sharply and felt the pain in his arm again. “I’m going to have to do something about you,” he said to his arm. Was it still dislocated? Again he didn’t know. He tried to wiggle his fingers and was happy to see that they moved.
Wearing a grim expression, Deanna came hurrying back; he grinned in spite of the fact that she looked as tall as a giant to him. “Can you climb?” she asked.
“Like a tree?” Neil was remembering the time he had saved Sadie in the field outside of New Eden. He had been brave that day and there was a tree. That was something he could remember.
Deanna snapped her fingers under his nose. “Neil, focus, please. Not a tree, but a ladder. Can you climb a ladder?” Before he could answer she glanced back the way they had come with fear on her face as more pieces of wood began to bounce down the stairs.
“Sure, letters are easy,” Neil replied with a wave of his good hand.
“No!” Deanna cried through gritted teeth. “A ladder. Can you climb a ladder?”
“Ooooh, a ladder. Of course. I don’t want to brag but I used to clean out my own gutters. Did you know that? And they were way up, like you know really high.”
“Good, good. Come on,” she said, pulling him up. He stood, but they didn’t move, instead she glanced back again toward the stairs where there was strange snapping and thumping noises occurring. He tried to turn to see what had her so nervous, only she wouldn’t let him. She pulled him along to one of the walls where she had shoved a rickety wooden ladder under a tiny little box of a window.
“Go, Neil. Don’t look back!” she hissed, pushing him upward.
“S’fine,” he slurred. It was a most difficult task she had set before him. The ladder seemed to have been poorly constructed. The rungs were never where his feet expected them to be. At first Deann
a helped him along, but then she spat out a long string of curses and began shooting again. “Do ya need help?” he asked.
“No. Just get out. Go through the window and keep quiet.”
That didn’t make sense. “Keep quiet? But you’re being so loud with that gun, you’ll wake the neighbors.” He looked through the open window. It was dark and there was a moaning in the night. “Oh yeah. They’re all dead.”
“Go!” Deanna said, hitting him on the butt.
I don’t need to be told twice, he thought to himself as he pushed through the small window. It was splintery and hard, and he had to squirm. “I feel like how, you know, a robot feels being born,” he said to Deanna when he was halfway through.
She fired her gun twice before whispering, “Please be quiet.”
“S’fine. I’ll be quiet.” Finally, he was free of the window and found himself on the side of a house that he didn’t recognize. A hundred questions welled up in him but he bit them back—there were zombies trying to climb up the side of the porch at the end of the house. “I gotta be quiet,” he muttered.
As he stood there, he heard a whining sound, like an injured dog and then a whisper, “Neil, help. One of them has me.” Deanna was half-in and half-out of the window; her face contorted in misery and fear. “Do something.”
He stared, open-mouthed for a few seconds as his drug-dulled mind came up with a simple plan. “Hold on,” he said, but then reversed himself immediately. “No, I mean let go. I’m gonna pull you through.” Had he not been so spaced out from the oxycodone he might have revised the plan, after all, he was small and relatively weak and only could use his left arm. However, in his present state of mind, he didn’t feel there was anything he could not do.
With his legs braced, he squatted and took hold of her BDU jacket, and then he heaved her through the window, dragging her a few feet through the dirt until she was fully stretched out on the ground. Immediately, she turned over and inspected her legs and feet. One of her shoes had been ripped off her foot but the sock was intact.
“Holy hell, it almost got me,” she said, with a voice that shook.
Now it was Neil’s turn to shush her. He put a finger to her lips and said, “Quiet. There’s monsters.” It was too late, the monsters had heard her and were charging them. “Holy crap!” he yelled. “Let’s get out of here.”
They ran for the Toyota Four Runner that Deanna had picked up. Neil was slow; the driveway was like the ladder and his feet went sometimes too far apart and sometimes kicked each other and other times they swung outward instead of forward. “They should fix thish road,” He said.
Even with only one shoe on, Deanna went much faster. Breathless, she made it to the truck ahead of Neil and threw open the door for him. She watched over his head at the onrushing zombies and said, “Neil, you gotta hurry!”
“I am hurrying,” Neil replied, huffing up the drive. “This is me hurrying. I don’t get much faster than this.” The second he got to the truck, Deanna shoved him into the passenger seat and then ran around to get into the driver’s side. As the zombies reached them, she cranked the Toyota into reverse and floored it, causing Neil to be thrown forward to crumple under the dashboard. Even with the drugs in his system, he cried out in pain.
Deanna gave him a sudden guilty look. “I forgot your pain meds. They’re still in the kitchen.”
“That s’okay,” Neil said, already forgetting the pain of a moment before. “I feel fine.” This was the last thing he remembered of the night. The next thing he knew he woke in someone’s living room, stretched out on a dusty couch. The air was hot, the kind of muggy heat that had him sweating just lying there. Outside, the cicadas were loud, their endless: rheeeeeee, drilled into Neil’s head, making it ache. He had cottonmouth, bleary eyes, and, although he had just woken, he was already in need of a nap.
He knew this feeling; it meant he was hung over. “But I didn’t drink anything,” he whispered. And then he remembered the oxycodone. “It was the pills.”
Next to him, lying on a mattress wearing only a T-shirt and panties—her legs looking longer than he was tall—Deanna gave him a sympathetic smile and said, “We’re all out, sorry.” Her skin shimmered with a fine coat of sweat; on her, it was mesmerizing.
Neil quickly looked up at the ceiling, realizing he had been staring. “I didn’t do anything, you know, stupid last night, did I?”
She gave him a pained look and replied, “No, you just got a little weepy.”
Weepy? He didn’t like the sound of that, though he supposed it was better than if he had tried putting the “moves” on her. “Sorry, I was such a pain.” He sat up, grunting as a sharp pain shot from his shoulder down his arm. Just like that, Deanna hopped up and threw on a pair of pants; Neil made a conscientious effort to inspect the tops of his toes as she did. She left him on the couch and came back a minute later grinning, holding up a blue sling.
“This place has everything,” she said. “There’s food and water and gas. Lots and lots of gas. There’s enough stuff here to last a couple of people for some time.”
She handed Neil the sling and he puzzled over wondering how it went on. He asked her, “And what happens when the owners come back?”
She pointed at the ceiling. “They are dead. As far as I can tell the man got bit somehow and the woman put him out of his misery before killing herself.”
“Sad,” Neil commented, brushing over the deaths with a single word. “We’ll need to pack as much as we can and then get moving.”
“You still want to keep scouting?” Deanna asked in disbelief.
“Of course. People are counting on us to see them across the river and then across the plains. We can’t let a few injuries get in our way.”
Deanna scoffed, “A few injuries! Bill is dead and you can barely move your arm. How do you plan on getting back across the river? You could barely do it when you had both arms.”
Neil wasn’t going to be stopped by something so trivial as a dislocated shoulder. There were ways to cross if one was determined enough. “We’ll do it the same way Jillybean did. We’ll build a raft. It shouldn’t be that hard.”
She looked like she wanted to argue more, but stopped herself. “Okay, so we go north towards Cape Girardeau and the River King, but do we have to travel in the middle of the day? Don’t you think that’s pressing our luck too far?”
What luck? he wanted to ask. The way he saw it, they had been the most unlucky group in the history of the universe. Still she had a point. “You’re right. We’ll leave at sunset. In the meantime we’ll catalog what we have and figure out what’s essential and what isn’t. We should also find a second vehicle, preferably a truck that can hold a raft.”
“That won’t be so easy,” Deanna said. “There’s a reason why this house hasn’t been looted before. This town has boatloads of zombies running around. I’m talking thousands.”
Neil went to the front window and peeked through the cracks of the boards covering it. Just as Deanna had said there were zombies everywhere. Skinny, hungry looking zombies at that. “It’s never easy, is it?” he asked under his breath.
Chapter 15
Jillybean
The day was a long one, especially since Ipes remained in timeout until after lunch. To pass the time, she read. In one of the dead soldier’s dressers, she found a bible. She took one look at the millions of tiny words and said, “Whoa,” and put it back where she found it.
Another soldier had stacks of girlie magazine, which she stared at with wide eyes. The pictures made no sense to her; why would someone want to barbecue without any clothes on? She was trying to puzzle everything out, but when she heard voices in the hall, she shoved the magazines back where they belonged and tried not to let the guilt show on her face.
She rushed to the next dresser in the room and made a great show of looking at the magazine she found there. They all had to do with cars. The pictures on the front were neat looking but on the inside it was just a lot of babbl
e concerning carburetors and engines and something called torque which she did not quite understand. When the voices in the hall retreated, she shoved the magazines back in the drawer and went to the last dresser in the four-person room.
This one at least held books that were closer to what she was looking for: comic books. She would have preferred Dr. Seuss or Clifford the Big Red Dog, however she knew beggars couldn’t be choosers. Jillybean nosed through the comics hoping to find something nice. The first few had blood-splattered covers and scary-looking people in costumes on the front. She didn’t bother even cracking it. The best she could do were a few issues of The Amazing Spiderman that she found at the bottom of the drawer. Thankfully, there was very little blood and gore to these stories; Spiderman generally used his webs to capture bad guys, or knock them out with a punch. These were much more her speed and she read each of the four cover to cover. With her limited reading ability this took up a good chunk of the day.
The other renegades lounged around the barracks until after dinner. Then they began dressing up once again as monsters for the trip north. For the most part they were excited and eager; even Fred Trigg was in a peppy mood. “This can work,” he said. “The River King will never look for us so close. You people should have listened to me a long time ago.”
Ipes, who didn’t want to go back in the time out so quickly, bit his lip and smiled with complete fakery. That Fred sure is a genius, he said. He’s nearly as smart as Michael is hairy.
Jillybean knew that was a putdown but as it involved Fred she didn’t say anything on account that she secretly agreed. She let it pass and only tapped her toes, anxiously. “Do you know what time it is, Ipes?” He told her it was just after nine to which she let out a long sigh.
The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades Page 12
